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Though OmniWeb is still my primary browser, I mentioned in my February update that it's not where Omni's attention is at the moment. As a company, our attention this year has been focused on projects like OmniFocus 2, OmniOutliner 4, and OmniPresence—leaving OmniWeb as a "labor of love" project which I work on personally during my spare time.

Well, good news: I just had a brief vacation, and now have the 64-bit version of OmniWeb in a reasonably stable state. The user interface of this version has barely been touched (sorry, I'm afraid it's still using drawers rather than a sidebar!); but it's had a whole lot of work done under the hood—enough so that I've decided to call this version 6, not another version 5.x.

There are some big steps forward in this release: it's now 64-bit, and uses the latest version of WebKit (rather than embedding a customized snapshot of WebKit that continually falls out of date). That's mostly what this release is about, though there are also a few minor fixes like adding DuckDuckGo as a built-in search shortcut, skipping autofill for password fields that already have a password in them (so it won't wipe out a password you've typed), ad-blocking support for CSS and JavaScript resources (not just images and plug-ins), and so on.

But there are also some steps backwards. Bookmark syncing needs to be rewritten to be based on the approach used in OmniPresence, OmniPlan, or OmniFocus (haven't made up my mind which yet). Site icons ("favicons") are missing. Blocked content should be listed in Page Info and loaded by the "Load All Images" menu item (which should probably be renamed now that other resources can also be blocked).

I expect to be pretty busy with our commercial products until my next vacation, so please don't expect many updates between now and then. But I'm using this version for >99% of my desktop browsing, and I'm hoping a few of you will find it as useful as I do.

I’ve downloaded and tried the new version, and from what I can see immediately, OmniWeb runs great and seems to me even faster than the old version! :–)

One hint for those who are also going to install the new version: The individual Workspaces, Bookmarks etc. are all preserved and used in the new version, but the Preferences are not! So don’t delete your old version just yet. You can launch it along the new version of OmniWeb without problems, and then can compare and adjust the new OmniWeb’s Preferences to those you used in your old version.

One hint for those who are also going to install the new version: The individual Workspaces, Bookmarks etc. are all preserved and used in the new version, but the Preferences are not! So don’t delete your old version just yet. You can launch it along the new version of OmniWeb without problems, and then can compare and adjust the new OmniWeb’s Preferences to those you used in your old version.

I found that this is specifically true for History data. If you set your OmniWeb 5 Preferences to save more than the default of 30 days of history, and then launch OmniWeb 6 for the first time, it will use the default of 30 days and immediately delete the rest of your History.

So in this case, it’s best to immediately change the History period to the desired value in OmniWeb 6, quit OmniWeb 6 and then restore the old (pre-OmniWeb 6) History.plist file from a (Time Machine or other) backup. The next time OmniWeb 6 is launched, it will behave as it should.

Wow thanks so much Ken. Any hints on how to get this running on 10.6.8? These Lion/Mt Lion releases have done me no favours. I'd love to chip in to pay for your next holiday to work on OW ;-)

I’d be surprised if it was possible without a lot of effort to get the new OmniWeb running on 10.6. There are many API differences in OS X between 10.6 and >= 10.7, and given the very limited time that’s available for this project as a whole, I doubt it would be wise to spend resources on supporting outdated OS versions. Why are you still running 10.6? Soon we’ll be on 10.9 …

I’d be surprised if it was possible without a lot of effort to get the new OmniWeb running on 10.6. There are many API differences in OS X between 10.6 and >= 10.7, and given the very limited time that’s available for this project as a whole, I doubt it would be wise to spend resources on supporting outdated OS versions. Why are you still running 10.6? Soon we’ll be on 10.9 …